Jeff is quotingDaniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code which references the study. Now I'm referring to Jeff -> Daniel -> Yeager et al. And you are at the front of the line of referral - maybe you should jump the line - read the original work.

Health care in the USA is under great pressure to change these days. So regardless of which pole of the political sphere you personally are drawn toward, the landscape underneath your view point will be changing. One could ask why. It is an interesting line of inquiry. Will the fact that health care is just too costly, increasing at exponential rates, and leaving an ever enlarging number of americans out of the "care" system suffice for the moment?

So this domain of the american system is being pushed off a proverbial cliff into a turbulent troubled sea of change. I wonder - do we have any system models that would describe what might help in these situations?

Here's a case in point, a CEO announce a spur of the moment policy change, a move toward transparency. Why? Perhaps he was frustrated with the ill-rational behavior of "the system". And decide that a move toward transparency was a rational behavior.

December's issue of Harvard Business Review creates a compelling case for the concept of persistent teams. And hey, if they do it in the operating room, then there must be good science behind it. But heck, we don't need no stinking science, we just know it works, right?

Our company just discovered an interesting impediment this past week. The Dallas ICEpocalypse of 2013 resulted in many companies shutting their offices, ours did this also, both Friday and Monday (Dec. 6th & 9th) - someone even opened an outdoor ice skating rink in Dallas. Yet many team members worked from home, and to do this many had to use the Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access secure systems. Guess what impediment a few thousand employees all working from home the same day causes? The VPN is a licensed infrastructure with a license limit. Yep! only a fraction of the people working from home could access the limited licenses of the software VPN.

So I wonder if there is a system, known to mankind, that is designed to deal with this sort of constraint and surge in usage.... isn't that new fangled cloud computing environment designed to handle this very sort of on demand scalability?

So I understand the need of the company IT department to purchase a limited number …

Refactoring is when a developer changes the structure of the code without changing the behavior. To do this with little or no risk a craftsman will have a set of well maintained tests that prove the code still behaves exactly as before.

A simple way to visualize refactoring is to think of 12 eggs. Most people will imagine a carton of eggs. But it is possible to think of 2 cartons of 6 eggs; or even 6 packages of two hardboiled eggs. Refactoring get's its name from the factorization of numbers. Twelve has multiple factors (6 x 2), (3 x 4), (2 x 6), (1 x 12). No matter which factorization the resulting collection is twelve eggs. In TDD we have test to make sure we don't break the eggs.

Note: Many IDE's claim to do refactoring, and many times they work just as expected; however not all IDE refactorings are reliable. I suggest you test your IDE's refactoring before you trust it.

I hear lots of colleagues using the term 'technical debt' and the scenario that plays in my brain's cineplex is from The Princess Bride when Inigo Montoya remarks to Vizzini; "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

Inconceivable!

So what does "Technical Debt" mean? And what do my colleague's typically mean if it is not truly technical debt.

The first is easy; the definition of Technical Debt:

He who coins the term gets to define the term (that's Ward Cunningham).

OK, so to be truly technical debt one must negotiate the debt with the business. The business should achieve some objective sooner and incur an obligation to repay the technical team the time and effort required to put the system back into a proper state of clean well factored code.

But, wait... what could my colleagues mean when they misuse the term technical debt? I think they mean many things, but si…

What do you do when the Product Solutions Director comes to you and suggest that she would like a product delivered within a 5% error on the delivery date?

One suggestion is to run through a thought experiment with her. For example: Let's assume this is a project that will take about 6 months. Let's base the schedule on a 180 day time line. So you desire us to hit that 180 day target from six months away to within 5%. OK that's 0.05 * 180 = 9 days. Now is that a plus or minus 5% or a 5% range? Or in absolute terms for this example do I have to be within 171 - 189 days (+/-5%) or within 176 - 185 days (5%). So to continue this example, consider a team doing 2 week sprints. This would equate to 12 - 13 sprints with one sprint error.

But perhaps more important is what this one prime aspect of project success says about the other aspects of the project. So lets try to balance the project success aspects with the schedule being the one most important aspect. Given th…

Sprint length - a fun debate. What is the best practice - a funny question. There is no best practice for sprint length. But what factors should go into the decision?

The team's ability to become predictable within the sprint duration.The Product Owner's ability to plan and to commit to the unknown of not changing the plan for the sprint's duration.The frequency of needed feedback on the direction the team is making toward the release goal.The ability of the team to create their sustainable pace.

Many team's I've worked with have trouble defining their sustainable pace. I've argued that this pace that allows the team to deliver both working software that is potentially shippable each sprint and to have high quality deliverables along with team learning is quite a bit below the teams typical sprint velocity.

What do the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays do to your teams tempo and cadence?

For most US teams this holiday period from mid November to after the first of January is hectic and disruptive in various ways. This calls for a Holiday Stratagem. A trick to allow the team to have some semblance of continuity and flow during these times.

To discuss this stratagem let's first define some terms:

Tempo - the rate of workdays to calendar daysCadence - the beat of the sprint events to fall upon the same calendar day of the weekSprint duration - in work days (in this example I'll use 10 work days)Sprint length - the length of calendar days between two sprints (14 days for the example 2 week sprint)

What do you value more? The ability to deliver more work in the short term -or- the ability to predict long term the capability of the team to deliver that work? Or perhaps something else, like teaching a new team the trade-offs in making decisions and helping them to learn from refle…

I first feel in love with Agile by reading Larman's Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide. The organizational context that sets the stage for comparing and contrasting various agile (and non-agile) methods of software development is a powerful framework. I find few managers choosing a method understand these concepts enough to make an informed choice. Only a few hours with this book would raise their awareness to a much improved state.

Here how I started a mini-movement... one email...

I find an empty book shelf to be an aberration. So I’m filling it up with techie books and some not so techie books. Feel free to BORROW a book for a few weeks then bring it back for someone else to borrow. Bring in those dusty books you found interesting and join me in creating a Tech Dev Lending Library. Connector Breakout Lounge 5001.There is no check out system, no late fees…

What are the individual elements that make a Scrum task board effective for the team and the leadership of the team? There are a few basic elements that are quite obvious when you have seen a few good Scrum boards... but there are some other elements that appear to elude even the most servant of leaders of Scrum teams.

In general I'm referring to a physical Scrum board. Although software applications will replicated may of the elements of a good Scrum board there will be affordances that are not easily replicated. And software applications offer features not easily implemented in the physical domain also.

Scrum Info Radiator Checklist (PDF)
Basic ElementsBoard Framework - columns and rows laid out in bold colors (blue tape works well)Attributes: space for the total number of stickies that will need to belong in each cell of the matrix; lines that are not easy eroded, but are also easy to replace; see Orientation.

In the practice of Scrum many people appear to have their favorite method of calculating the team's velocity. For many this exercise appears very academic. Yet when you get three people and ask them you will invariability get more answers than you have belly-buttons. That in its self is an interesting phenomenon, worthy of a blog post. But this is not it.

Calculus is the mathematical study of change.

This video is a photo journal simulation describing how to calculate a Scrum sprint velocity. It explains the calculus for one of the most difficult decision a team faces. What to do with that first unfinished story.

Are your teams having difficulty understanding the relative nature of story points? Try an analogy ... maybe one that is already well know... yet so often used that they have forgotten just how easy it is to use relative measures. I'll bet they use it every day, multiple times per day. That kind of practice makes usage very easy. That is how easy story points will become for a team that practices.

Here's your analogy - in less than 10 seconds. But you might need to repeat it about 14 times...

Is this a trend in the industry? Perhaps some of the first movers in the work-from-anywhere movement have had a chance to see the return on this policy. Perhaps they have some indicators that collaboration is a skill best practiced in person. Practiced with full body awareness, in sense-around with many of our more that 20 senses - rather than just a select few. Are you aware of how many entities must practice the same behavior, concurrently for there to be a true movement? Do you want to be on the front end of the last movement in your industry or the bleeding edge of this movement?

Yahoo sees the ROI from canceling the work from home policy."There is definitely merit to the idea, however, that bringing its agile programming teams together in the same place at the same time can have a small but crucial impact on performance. In his book People Analytics, MIT visiting scientist Ben Waber discusses the role of dependencies for programmers, that teams must coordinate closely …

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Assuming you are on a Scrum/Agile software development team, then one of the first 'working agreements' you have created with your team is a 'Definition of Done' - right?

Oh - you don't have a definition of what aspects a user story that is done will exhibit. Well then, you need to create a list of attributes of a done story. One way to do this would be to Google 'definition of done' ... here let me do that for you: http://tinyurl.com/3br9o6n. Then you could just use someone else's definition - there DONE!

But that would be cheating -- right? It is not the artifact - the list of done criteria, that is important for your team - it is the act of doing it for themselves, it is that shared understanding of having a debate over some of the gray areas that create a true working agreement. If some of the team believes that a story being done means that there can be no bugs found in the code - but some believe that there can be some minor issues - well, then yo…

I’ve noticed a new trend—people have been gaining titles. When I was younger, only doctors had initials (like MD) after their names. I always figured that was because society held doctors, and sometime priests (OFM) in such high regard that we wanted to point out their higher learning. I hope it was to encourage others to apply themselves in school and become doctors also. Could it have been boastful?

The Wikipedia describes these “post-nominal initials”:Post-nominal letters, also called post-nominal initials, are letters placed after the name of a person to indicate that the individual holds a position, educational degree, accreditation, office, or honor. An individual may use several different sets of post-nominal letters. The order in which these are listed after a name is based on the order of precedence and category of the order.
That’s good enough for me.
So I ask you: is the use of CSM or CSP an appropriate use of post-nominal initials?
If your not an agilista, you may wonder …

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What I notice first and really like is the subtle implication in the shadow of the "i" in Drive is a person taking one step in a running motion. This brings to mind the old saying - "there is no I in TEAM". There is however a ME in TEAM, and there is an I in DRIVE. And when one talks about motivating a team or an individual - it all starts with - what's in it for me.

Introduction

Pink starts with an early experiment with monkeys on problem solving. Seems the monkeys were much better problem solver's than the scientist thought they should be. This 1949 experiment is explained as the early understanding of motivation. At the time there were two main drivers of motivation: biological & external influences. Harry F. Harlow defines the third drive in a novel theory: "The performance of the task provided intrinsic reward" (p 3). This is Dan Pink's M…

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought the technique needed to move forward was one thing, yet the person leading (your leader) assumed something else was what was needed? Did you feel misaligned, unheard, marginalized? Would you believe that 54% of all leaders only use ONE style of leadership - regardless of the situation? Does that one style of leading work well for the many levels of development we see on a team?

Perhaps your team should investigate one of the most widely used leadership models in the world ("used to train over 5 million managers in the world’s most respected organizations"). And it's not just for the leaders. The training is most effective when everyone receives the training and uses the model. The use of a ubiquitous language on your team is a collaboration accelerator. When everyone is using the same mental model, speaking the same vernacular hours of frustration and discussion may be curtailed, and alignment achieved, outcomes …